“The Aesthetic in Experience,” by John Dewey. A Short Response
“Direct experience comes from nature and man interacting with each other”
Aesthetic experience occurs within the flux of life; in the breaking apart and reencountering of life; in the moment of passage from disturbance into harmony. I really enjoyed the idea of the lack of stasis that this essay offers. Life is not a static mode of existence that we can randomly sample and expect similar results from; it is rather a mobile and exciting journey and sets of interactions which are in themselves beautiful in their complexity. I’ve always entertained the idea of the universe being a sort of immensely complex algebraic formula which is constantly being unbalanced from all sides and is constantly trying to find stasis but never reaching it due to the movement resulting from the Big Bang. In this way of understanding existence, movement means life and the lack thereof means death. We can never stop, even when we try to, our cells are dividing, our blood pumping, our neurons firing, and our bacteria interacting with us and us with our surroundings. This I find to be the ultimate aesthetic experience, within the reality I’ve lived in and the understanding I’ve gathered thus far.
I like the idea of a fulfilled experience being consummation instead of cessation. It becomes a whole experience which has its own standing within our reality. This concept holds a nice circularity about it and it hinges on the closing of cycles for it to be considered a whole, beautiful, aesthetic experience within experience itself. “The word ‘aesthetic’ refers to experience as appreciative, perceiving, and enjoying. It denotes the consumer’s rather than the producer’s standpoint. It is Gusto, taste...” When a true aesthetic experience is reached, it is the whole being that operates simultaneously as consumer and producer in order to fully express the full range of the experience, “...expression is emotional and guided by purpose”.